Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @11:10AM
from the if-you-can-watch-them dept.

itwbennett writes "Amazon sent out a press release over the weekend announcing that the pilots for their original shows 'held 8 spots on the list of 10 most streamed Amazon VOD episodes.' So blogger and entertainment junkie Peter Smith decided to spend a couple of hours seeing if they were worth watching. He managed to sit through 4 of the 8 comedy shows and found a mixed bag — one a clear miss, two meh, and one he'd like to see turned into a series. Have you watched any of the pilots? What did you think?" The quality of these the pilots is not the only way they're a mixed bag: for many Linux users, they're simply not watchable. Watch soon for unknown_lamer's screed on the fat lot of good(will) Amazon is generating by making it harder to legally get these shows.

It would be better than most of this crap. But still, animation is very expensive (especially on an established show where the voice cast and animators ain't gonna work for cheap). Even if they wanted to pick up a show that's already been cancelled twice, I doubt they could afford it.

Supanatural is hilarious. It's like a Venture Brothers take on the show Supernatural (and the like), but with female leads. It's a little rough around the edges, but I would absolutely tune in to that every week.

FWIW, it's produced by comedian Kristen Schaal, of 30 Rock, The Daily Show, Bob's Burgers. If you like any of those shows, you should give it a shot.

Some of my favorite shows are sitcoms. I actually would like to see them replace the reality TV filler. I liked "The Office", "Modern Family", and "30 Rock" most recently. I understand "Parks and Recreation" is good, but I haven't seen it yet.

Agreed, while people may love them, lets leave them on Network television which has become a vapid wasteland of derivative narratives for simple people

There is no point for Netflix to duplicate network garbage. If Netflix can't rise above the average POS sitcom and crime scene show on networks then there is absolutely no point for Netflix to do original programming..

Netflix should set the integrity of their original programming to not just be about ratings or top 10 lists, the way the network television ha

This is a follow-up. In the summary, "their original shows" cites the same Slashdot story you mention. You may have a valid complaint about how too many follow-ups makes a story look like a Slashvertisement, but a follow-up is not exactly a dupe.

Unless.. this is a hedge against the imminent online sales tax. When - not if - when is happens, their business model is almost toast. They still don't have the overhead of retails stores and they'll be able to offer 30% discounts. BUt...

Amazon is so much cheaper and more convenient than in-store alternatives that an extra 6.25% (IL tax rate) is not going to stop people from saving 25-40% on their purchases online. It will certainly cut into their sales, just like anything that would raise their prices for most people by a small percentage. But their business model is certainly not toast.

33+% less on most books (and therefore 33+% less sales tax) than your local brick and mortar is still a hell of good deal. As long as Amazon's prices are significantly lower, sales taxes are lower since you pay tax based on the price you pay, not the MSRP. Still a better deal than regular stores.

33+% less on most books (and therefore 33+% less sales tax) than your local brick and mortar is still a hell of good deal. As long as Amazon's prices are significantly lower, sales taxes are lower since you pay tax based on the price you pay, not the MSRP. Still a better deal than regular stores.

In addition, it only takes about a month after first release for a book to have quite a few high quality used copies available from Amazon sellers, often at even better prices.

Amazon proper plus all the sellers makes it much better than any B&M bookstore for selection and price. Add in the fact that it's not just books, and it's hard to beat, regardless of sales tax.

After I did this in Firefox, I was able to watch them in Chromium too but ran into problems trying to get it working in the first place in Chromium. I've read that Google Chrome simply won't play them on Linux because of some recent changes Google made. So, yea... not as easy as it should be but it should be watchable unless I've missed a different reason why they're not watchable for so many users.

Let's talk about all the cargo-cult Flash "programmers" who just have to check if you're using the very latest version of Flash before you can look at their content - even though it doesn't use any new features...

I've read that Google Chrome simply won't play them on Linux because of some recent changes Google made.

Yeah, Ubuntu 13.04 has a weird dependency problem - I think it's Ubuntu's fault because it worked fine in 12.10. Looks like someone found a workaround [handytutorial.com] by downloading a.deb package from 12.10 and dropping it on 13.04.

So, this guy is trying to be at least semi-pro about this, and we're supposed to care what he thinks and says, but he can't be bothered to watch one episode each of eight different shows before writing an article about it?

How long are these? I'm guessing an hour. You can't spend eight hours WATCHING TV before writing an article you're being paid for?

And then it gets put up on Slashdot?

Has online journalism/tech news fallen so low that this qualifies as worth a front-page mention?

It's even worse. They're all half hour pilots, sans commercials, so 21-22 minutes long each. You can blow through them all in about 2.5 hours, though I only made it a few minutes into a couple of them before I had to turn it off. Some of these things were beyond terrible. One or two gems, though.

Has online journalism/tech news fallen so low that this qualifies as worth a front-page mention?

The editors on Slashdot were outsourced to 7 line perl scripts. This story had all of the right keywords, so it was posted. It's your fault, really. If you'd thrown more money at the site before this had happened, the site's editors could have been replaced by a 12 line perl script...

Until linux has something resembling a decent marketshare on the desktop, stop expecting publishers to care about or support it. It's simply not worth their time to devote the time of their engineering teams to support Linux when they're not likely to see a huge return on that investment.

Most folks running Linux are smart enough to run a Windows VM if they want to watch Amazon videos, and if they don't want to because of pride or some other "belief", then that's THEIR decision.

Also, I don't have any statistics, but I've got to believe that a large portion of Amazon clients are STBs, not computers.

So, buy a STB that supports Amazon, or buy an OEM Windows license and spin up a VM.

Now, if only Amazon would release an iOS app. That's a huge market segment that they're alienating by not having their content available. I want to be able to watch Amazon video on my phone just like I can watch Netflix and Hulu on my phone.

Steam has come to Linux because Valve has become very openly dissatisfied with Windows 8 and the direction DirectX is taking. I suspect that the SteamBox project played a large part in the decision to make a linux port, and I further suspect that that decision wasn't about enabling folks running linux to run steam nearly as much as it was about making sure linux was supported so when the SteamBoxes start rolling off the assembly line they can actually run Steam.

Right, exactly. Hit the nail on the head. Linux support matters HERE. Not out in the rest of the world where it's about making money from a product instead of embracing open standards. I stand by my original statement. If it were financially advantageous for Amazon to invest the effort in creating a linux solution for their video platform, they would.

Sure, they could probably make some money from folks running linux than would subscribe to Prime for the videos, but in the grand scheme of things, pr